I don't know what kind of operating system you're running but on Windows all the Zhuyin layouts I've seen haven't been like that at all. I think a layout in alphabetical order would actually be easier to memorize.

One thing I'm looking forward to is the day they make an input method for traditional characters based on Hanyu Pinyin. If one exists I'm not aware of it.

Talib wrote:I don't know what kind of operating system you're running but on Windows all the Zhuyin layouts I've seen haven't been like that at all. I think a layout in alphabetical order would actually be easier to memorize.

One thing I'm looking forward to is the day they make an input method for traditional characters based on Hanyu Pinyin. If one exists I'm not aware of it.

I was referring to the Zhuyin layouts shown in the above post.

But yea; there aren't really any input methods for traditional using Hanyu Pinyin. Of course you could just set MS pinyin to type in Traditional characters, though it isn't "designed" for it; for the most part it works okay.

I haven't seen any others in a different order but then I prefer to use pinyin anyway. It's just faster.

But yea; there aren't really any input methods for traditional using Hanyu Pinyin. Of course you could just set MS pinyin to type in Traditional characters, though it isn't "designed" for it; for the most part it works okay.

You can?

Okay, I just sorted this out. Thanks for telling me that. I never would have guessed it otherwise. For my part I like Zhuyin but I can't be bothered learning yet another keyboard layout.

Yea, qwerty is illogical and all that but it actually /isn't that bad/. At least there is a fair bit of alternation; it uses only 3 rows of the keyboard, etc etc.

The ribbon getting caught myth wasn't due to speed though; it was due to letters being pressed together, that's why the aim of qwerty was to get most of the keypresses to be away from each other, which actually is good for ergonomics.

The standard Zhuyin keyboard is beyond horrible. One could argue that putting consonants on one side and vowels on the other is good for alternation; which is true perhaps, though it would definitely be a very right-heavy layout since Chinese doesn't have consonant clusters, though right-heavy isn't always bad if you are right handed. But the biggest design flaw is putting the tone marks in the hard to reach 4th row. In most Zhuyin IMEs, you /have/ to input the tone marks, so it just doesn't make sense to put them so high. The keyboard I use puts them on the home row keys of d,f,j,k respectively for 1,2,3,4.

Another thing is, is that they don't need to use the 4th row. My Zhuyin keyboard uses only 3 rows, and it works by having multiple Zhuyin on a single key, and that works because there are many combinations that are impossible. The only benefit to using 4 rows is perhaps it is easier to organize the keyboard into its simple alphabetical order.

But yea; there aren't really any input methods for traditional using Hanyu Pinyin. Of course you could just set MS pinyin to type in Traditional characters, though it isn't "designed" for it; for the most part it works okay.

Google's IME for Chinese supports the use of Pinyin for typing in Traditional characters exclusively. Go to page 1 of this thread and you'll see the link for downloading the program in my first post.

According to the Chinese-language Wikipedia article on Google Pinyin [5], as well as numerous bug entries [6][7] in the support section of the Google Pinyin website, the Traditional Chinese mode of this input method editor was significantly limited prior to version 2.2.12.74; some characters were impossible to enter, for example 台 (tai). Another flaw in earlier versions was that the IME would select the incorrect character in the Traditional Chinese input mode, for example, using the character 發 (fa1, "to issue") in 頭髮 (tou2fa, "hair") or using 谷 (gu3, "valley") in 穀物 (gu3wu4, "grain"). These errors were the result of the system internally using Simplified Chinese (and GBK encoding) exclusively, so this bug was more of a design flaw than a phrase database insufficiency. However, the current version (2.2.12.74) has been significantly improved in its ability to render the correct traditional Chinese characters under the IME's Traditional Chinese mode.

Well, I went to Wikipedia to find this quote to prove my point, but if they fixed it then I guess that's good.